


This Time I Won't Miss You

by Friedcheesemogu



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Reincarnation, Canon Compliant - to some extent, F/M, Minor Reiner Braun/Bertolt Hoover, Pining that's probably mutual but no one's saying, Unreliable Memories, likely misuse of philosophies of time, mentions of the other Warriors, no gods no kings no self-preservation no betas
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-31
Updated: 2021-01-31
Packaged: 2021-03-18 06:00:09
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,800
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29113428
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Friedcheesemogu/pseuds/Friedcheesemogu
Summary: She teases Porco about his lack of emotional introspection, but he could easily call her out on the same. There's so much she doesn’t let herself think even as she recalls things that she shouldn’t because they never happened...right?*Spoilers for the manga*
Relationships: Pieck Finger & Porco Galliard, Pieck Finger/Porco Galliard
Comments: 18
Kudos: 82





	This Time I Won't Miss You

**Author's Note:**

> Welcome to another episode of "I Just Said I'd Never Write Again, But Would You Like Some Overwrought Extended Metaphors."
> 
> I've been hoping for a very long time that Isayama would write Pieck reacting to Porco's death, but at this point I'm pretty sure the best I'll get in written canon is her stricken expression when Falco says that he "wishes Mr. Galliard was here" and frankly that is not enough for me, who has also been hoping for a very long time that *I* would write Pieck reacting to Porco's death. So I did. And, uh. This is not what I'd expected, it's one of my "experimental adventures," but I offer it for your consideration. 
> 
> For once I came up with a title on my own, but the shape this shifted into owes itself to a number of things:  
> -["When Death Comes" by Mary Oliver,](http://www.phys.unm.edu/~tw/fas/yits/archive/oliver_whendeathcomes.html) which I have used to further my own melodramatic agendas  
> -["Any Case" by Wislawa Szymborska,](http://inwardboundpoetry.blogspot.com/2006/05/117-any-case-wislawa-szymborska.html) my favorite poem  
> -A particular line from "House of Leaves" by Mark Danielewski that has haunted me in its excellent wordplay for almost 20 years that I have finally hijacked and driven away wildly into the night  
> -My [Pieck/Porco Playlist](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/70sTnAGNmSL947LsxN0Bdd?si=KU3KLK3XQju0onKi935xVg)
> 
> It's unbeta'd, because it should be clear by now that I have weird issues about people knowing I've written something so I just hurl my love of thematic repetition into the open and then run. Are you ready (I'm not ready) here we go!

Grief is a luxury, and she doesn’t have the time for such things. She never has.

-

Pieck looks out the cafe window and hears it like the memory of half a song played from far away: _And I look upon time as no more than an idea_

She furrows her brow because _what?_ Where did that come from? She knows it’s from a poem, a relatively famous one, but most of her poetry knowledge was gone the moment that college course requirement was fulfilled. For the life of her she can’t remember the name of it or the author or even a single other line. It’s odd that it would just come into her head like that out of nowhere. 

Porco hasn’t noticed her consternation, he’s busy with what she likes to call his “multitasking.” Coffee mug held an inch from his mouth (yet somehow almost forgotten), taking the unexpectedly careful notes he always writes by hand and never shares with anyone but her. It quietly delights her, his softness in these moments.

But then she sees him holding a mug somewhere else, sometime else, at a desk in a plain room filled with tension, misery, half-formed hopes, the air stinging with bitterness. There’s no reason she should feel like she remembers this because she has never been here, this is not her memory, this isn’t her world. 

Then it’s gone, leaving behind deja vu’s uncomfortable residue. 

She shifts in her chair, pulling a leg up to tuck one foot under the opposite thigh. She accidentally kicks Porco’s shin on the way. He doesn’t react, but there’s a flicker of a smile across his face.

Blink and you miss it.

-

Time is a futile spiral, and she’s running out of it. She's always been racing against the clock.

-

“I swear to god,” Porco adjusts her further up his back, “If you throw up on me I will call you ‘Puke’ for the rest of your life.”

“Mmhmm,” Pieck smiles into the side of his neck, tightening her arms across his chest. “I’ve never done it before, why would I start now?”

“There’s a first time for everything.”

“Is there really?”

“What is this, a philosophy class now?”

Pieck likes the way he smells when he carries her this way, enough that sometimes she plays more incapacitated than she actually is in order to enjoy it. She’s generally too pragmatic for fanciful descriptions, but the scent of cheap detergent and expensive hair gel is familiar, as if she’s known it all her life and then some. 

“I’m just saying, that there are some things that you can only do ‘the first time,’ but there’s no other time, so it's also 'the last time,' there’s just...that moment, and that’s the only one, which is forever because every moment is every moment. Besides,” she sighs, “Time is a flat circle.”

“Oh my god, shut up Aristotle, you’re drunk.”

She laughs.

“It’s only kind of Aristotle, kind of bullshit, and just a little bit another show I wanted to watch with you that you slept through.”

“Pick more interesting shows and then I won’t fall asleep.” The defiant but playful blush is audible.

He’s carrying her because Pieck has won yet another drinking contest against Colt. Which, to be fair, she instigated (because Colt can never say no, he’s still hoping to win, for his own “first time”), so really she shouldn’t be getting the royal treatment for her bad behavior. But when they were leaving she swayed a little more than she needed to; she’d twisted her ankle a bit earlier in the week, so Porco was already in a protective, careful mood. She indulged them both.

“I feel bad for Colt.”

He snorts (an unfortunate habit, because it makes him sound so terribly much like his unfortunate namesake and he gets so terribly upset when anyone points it out).

“Yeah, you feel bad for him now. You were egging him on two hours ago.”

“He looked like he wanted it. He had a dream, and he went after it. I respect that.”

“No you fucking don’t, you liar.” Porco takes a very bouncy step to jostle her.

“Oof, hey,” she tries to smack him but only manages to get as far as her own forearm. “Careful or I really will end up with a new nickname and you’ll end up like Reiner.” Reiner, who drew the short straw, who always draws the short straw on these occasions but remains surprisingly resigned to seeing them through so someone makes sure Colt doesn’t wake up dead. “I feel bad for him too.”

“I don’t,” Porco smirks simultaneously with her saying “I know _you_ don’t,” since one of the codes Porco lives by is that Reiner Braun is his arch-nemesis, an ancient holdover from their childhood when Porco’s brother picked Reiner over him for something and he’s held a 10-year-old’s grudge ever since.

“Well, at least feel bad for Bertholdt when he gets home and finds Colt passed out in their bathtub again.”

“That’s his fault for being with Reiner.”

“Pock- hey!” He nips at her hand at the nickname, which only makes her want to use it more, “Pock, you don’t get to pick who you want to be with, it just happens. That’s the world we live in.”

“I can’t imagine a world where I’d want to be with Reiner.”

“Maybe you should talk to Bertholdt some time and ask about it.”

“Why? I don’t really give a shit.” They’re getting close to her apartment now, and he kneels down to let her climb off. “Besides, I’d rather talk to you.”

“But what if I wasn’t here?”

Pieck swings around to get in front of him. She knows she’s walking backwards far too easily for someone as plastered as she’s pretending to be, but Porco won’t notice, because that’s not the kind of thing Porco seems to register. Which is lucky for her, sometimes. And other times…

Porco is the very definition of a snotty and arrogant rebel who decidedly doesn’t have a cause, but he looks very nice in combat boots with his hair slicked back. He’s abrasive on purpose, argumentative by nature. He could be utterly unlikeable, yet he’s somehow undeniable. He’s her very best friend. He might be more than that. 

So when he scoffs, which is typical, she knows the sudden shadow that sweeps through his eyes like strings of a filmy black oil is not. Blink and she’d have missed it. 

“If you weren’t here, then I wouldn’t be here either. It’s that simple.”

“But what if you didn’t have a choice?” Pieck pushes open the door to her building. He reaches over her head to hold it open, adorably chivalrous in spite of himself, before following her in. 

“Pieck,” he sighs, “Who cares? It’s not gonna happen. I won’t let it this time.”

 _This time._ It almost makes her stumble, the surety of his statement. Like he knows something she doesn’t (or does she?) about how things have gone and how they’ll go, but then he doesn’t follow it up, so she wonders if he even knows he’s said it.

Porco pushes the elevator button to her floor, then mashes “door close” several times like he always does, ever impatient with everything but her.

When they reach her door, Pieck turns, putting her back against it, looking at him. A few strands of his perfect hair have come loose, they hang attractively over his forehead. His pants are dusty, maybe from when he knelt to pick her up, maybe from when he knelt to put her down. He’s certainly never knelt for anyone else. 

_It’s exactly the places where his legs were bitten through,_ she remembers, but how could she remember that, she didn’t see it, she wasn't there to see it, such an awful thing that never happened, never in the world, never in _this_ world—

_And I look upon time as no more than an idea_

Suddenly she feels like she actually _is_ going to be sick, and she scrabbles quickly for the doorknob, stabbing her key blindly at the lock until he puts his hand over hers and guides it into place. 

“Pieck,” he says, concerned, the way someone else might say “sweetheart,” might say “baby,” might say “hey” and then follow it up with a kiss that would clarify everything. 

“Just...suddenly got really nauseous.” She smiles up at him with her eyes closed so he can’t see into her. “I don’t want to be ‘Puke’ forever, and I know you’re petty enough to do it.”

“You want me to come in with you?” 

Yes. He usually does. They often (more than often) sleep over at each other’s apartments, in each other’s beds. Sometimes she’s woken up with his hard-on pressed against her thigh, sometimes he’s woken up with her hand down his boxers on his ass. If they’ve followed those moments to a plausible conclusion, they don't talk about it. If they've spent hours in a fugue state with their mouths pressed together, a conversation doesn't come up. What’s there to say? It’s never felt like anything that happens between them is some kind of groundbreaking “first time” or a declarative “last time” because it’s just the way it’s always been. The way they’ve always been. 

“No, I’m okay, thanks though.”

Porco has never been good at hiding his disappointment and he doesn't start now, but he nods, stepping back.

“Text me in three hours so I know you’re not dead of alcohol poisoning.”

“Porco,” she has the door open now, and leans her head against it. “I'll be fine. And by then we should both be asleep.”

“Three hours, Pieck,” he repeats, turning away, walking back down the hall, hands in the pockets of his jacket ( _it used to have a pattern on the back,_ she thinks, but it’s faded now and she can’t remember what it was — a star of some kind, maybe? A rose? Was there actually ever anything at all?) “Or I’ll call you. Relentlessly.”

“And if I put my phone on silent?”

“Then I guess maybe you’ll die and I won’t know.”

“No, I don’t think so. I think you’d get here in time and you’d save my life like you did before.” She says it absently, not actually remembering when, but it tastes like truth. 

Porco looks over his shoulder. He’s far enough away that she can’t quite read the whole depth of his expression, but there’s a weight to the way he hits the call button three times. He doesn’t respond until he’s inside, oddly backlit by fluorescent brightness that should be considerably less flattering.

“Well you’d better hope it goes both ways, then, because you owe me.”

Pieck practically falls into the apartment quickly before she has to watch the doors close around him like slow jaws from a bad dream. She doesn’t throw up, but she sits on the bathroom floor until back hurts, her legs hurt, her butt goes numb. Until it’s been exactly three hours so she can text him “oops I died” and a kissy-face emoji. He responds immediately with a hand flipping her off and a heart. Pieck clutches the phone to her chest feeling kissed breathless.

The next day, she suggests they move in together.

-

Life is unfair, she learned that early since she was going to die young. It turns out that death is unfair too, since he was going to (he was supposed to) outlive her by years.

The world is rapidly being reduced to this ship on a steaming ocean, the sorrow of the children she fails to comfort with the reality of time and how truly little of it they ever had at all.

-

If it wouldn’t have absolutely ruined the wedding, Pieck would have burst out laughing at Porco valiantly trying not to tear up at Reiner’s vows. As it was, she chewed the inside of her cheek until she thought she might bite all the way through, then bolted to the bathroom to have a complete giggle fit once the ceremony was over.

“If you say anything,” Porco hisses to her as she comes out (of course he’d been waiting outside, leaning against the wall, playing it cool and handsome and not at all sentimental in the suit he borrowed from his brother), “I'm gonna throw you off a building.”

 _You did once, more or less,_ she remembers, _and it was the first last time I saw you._

Wherever the thought came from, it threatens to sober her before she’s even gotten a chance to drink, so she grins brightly through it and pulls him to their table. 

“I didn’t know Reiner had this many friends,” he muses as he shrugs out of his coat and hangs it on the back of his chair. 

“Maybe they’re all Bertholdt’s,” Pieck suggests, tucking her hair behind her ears. It's partly to continue to illusion of having almost tamed her hair, partly to show off the earrings he’d bought her for no real reason except “they reminded me of you because they’re weird,” then quietly, "and I feel like I've seen them somewhere before." They’re silver, strange elongated masks that are mildly threatening, oddly familiar. They make her feel inexplicably powerful, but sometimes when she's wearing them she catches herself in the mirror and her heart aches.

“Maybe they’re paid actors.”

“I wish I was being paid for this,” says Annie as she sits down next to Pieck. “I don’t know how I’m going to afford the medical bills for what these shoes have done to me.”

Pieck rolls her eyes fondly.

“Can’t you take them off now? I ditched mine as soon as I could.” She turns sideways in her chair and leans back to raise her legs, putting her bare feet in Porco’s lap and wiggling her toes. 

“Gross,” he scowls, putting his hand on her ankle anyway. His thumb strokes absently at the back of her calf. 

“They make me as tall as Armin,” Annie mumbles into a wine glass, cheeks reddening. She’s as stubbornly bashful as Porco, and Pieck is about to ask about Annie’s new boyfriend when Annie adds, “And unlike some people, sometimes I'm capable of being ladylike.”

Porco barks out a terrifically ugly laugh at that coming from Annie of all people, which sets Pieck off too. A few heads turn to look. Annie just sighs like she’d rather be mining acid on the moon. 

“Is it too late to switch tables?”

The aforementioned Armin joins them a little later, along with several more of Reiner and Bertholdt’s friends from college. Pieck is very gracious and amiable to make up for Porco’s lack of personability; she says as much. 

“Fuck you too,” he offers sweetly, proving her right. He runs a finger up the sole of her foot so she jumps slightly. She gasps "Ass!" as wine sloshes onto the white tablecloth and he snickers, “Slob.”

That her feet remain in his lap through the salad course surely doesn’t go unnoticed, but no one comments on it. It occurs to Pieck that it probably looks like they’re “something.” She does nothing to confirm or deny anyone’s suspicion, not even her own.

-

Love is unfathomable, it was never an option. On some level, she’s aware that at its very heart, this nightmare cause that everyone here is going to die for is about love, and if that love is worth fighting for this way then it must be worth having, it must be worth going through the atrocity that is life itself.

But even now, her reasons to fight diminish. She lays it all out, gives up everything. She'd missed him. She misses him with every explosion she wrings out of herself. It’s too large to comprehend. It’s infinite, this love that neither of them could ever say or fight or die for enough, handless and built on broken teeth, filled with desperation and endurance until forever, which isn’t very long at all, because time is only an idea and this moment is every moment.

-

Porco expressly forbids her from goading their friend into one more drinking contest, but from the way he’s flailing to the music, Colt seems to be doing just fine on his own. And he’s far from alone: the floor is thick with terrible dancing, Reiner and Bertholdt in center, as alive as she’s ever seen them.

(And oddly, she feels for a moment like she knows that because she’s seen them mostly dead. But when? And where? And does it matter that doesn't hurt as much as when it's him?)

There’s a joy here that Pieck doesn’t entirely know how to accept; if she's completely honest, although she’s gotten and been everything she’s wanted so far in her life, it all seemed so natural that it was never worth celebrating. She teases Porco about his lack of emotional introspection, but he could easily call her out on the same. There's so much she doesn’t let herself think even as she recalls things that she shouldn’t because they never happened...right? But if they _did_ happen, then….

_And I look upon time as no more than an idea_

“I had a super fucked up dream last night,” Porco says suddenly. He’s at least three drinks in, the bright blush across his nose the only sign that might give him up to someone who doesn’t know him as well. It makes him obnoxiously handsome. “We were, um...soldiers or something. ‘Warriors,’ I think, was the word we kept using.”

He loosens his tie (only done properly to begin with because Pieck tied it for him) and stares at the centerpiece before continuing. 

“I dunno, it was a really messed up world, where we were fighting giant monsters but we were also the monsters?”

“Like ‘Pacific Rim?’”

“No, not like ‘Pacific Rim,” he slumps in his chair, folds his arms across his chest petulantly. “There weren’t any robots, and everyone was human but not? I don’t know.”

“Pock,” she starts, then realizes she has nothing to follow it up with. 

“I can’t remember most of it, but we were...whatever we were fighting, however we were fighting, we were awesome at it. Like we were born to do it or something, we just ran into the middle of shit together and I always knew where you were...until suddenly you were gone. I didn’t think you were dead, but that was the part where _I_ died, you know, the part where you always wake up, except before I woke up there was this pause that lasted like...it felt like forever and the whole time I could only think about how I didn’t know the last time I saw you would be first time I saw you for the last time, and that was just...wrong.”

Pieck swallows hard, but keeps her gaze steady. Porco sighs and shakes his head.

“It’s stupid, it sounds dumb when I say it like that, I don’t even know why I told you. It just...seemed like I should. Like you’d get it, because you were there? Except you weren’t. And when I woke up, I felt like...I just absolutely _missed_ you, even though you were still there. Or here, I mean. Or….” He laughs at himself, surprisingly gentle if slightly confused. “I’m drunk. Whatever.”

_And I look upon time—_

“Come on,” Pieck surprises herself by suddenly standing up and taking his hand, pulling him towards the dance floor. 

“What? No!”

“But yes.”

Piiiiiiiieck,” he drawls, “No, fuckin’...you know I don’t dance.”

“You do tonight.” 

“Ugh,” he drops his head back and groans, but lets her shape them into something resembling an awkward middle school dance pose — his hands on her waist and hers clasped behind his neck. “This is so embarrassing.”

“No more than anyone else. You’re making it more embarrassing by whining. Now sway with me.”

“It’s not even a slow song!”

He’s right, it isn’t. And with her heels still left behind under the table, she’s almost comically short in his arms.

“I don’t care.”

“At least let’s pretend that we’re…” Porco trails off, and although usually she can figure out what he might say, now she has no clue. It could be so many things. Pretend that we’re adults? Pretend that we’re something people can define? Pretend we’ve done this before? Pretend we haven’t?

_—as no more than an idea_

Pretend that this moment isn’t every moment?

Porco takes a hand from her waist, reaching up to remove one of hers from his neck. For a split second, Pieck is afraid of something she’s never feared before: that he might let go, move away. That there’s an end to this, whatever _this_ is. But he slides their palms together, intertwines their fingers, the imitation of people who might know what they’re doing when music plays at a party. 

“Pock.”

He doesn’t say anything. They do sway, just barely. Other people gradually fill in the space around them. Someone (probably Colt) nearly crashes into them and for once it doesn’t spark Porco’s ire.

“Pock, what are we?”

_What were we? What have we been all this time? What will we be?_

“Does it matter? As long as we’re together...” He lets that last part hang between a question and a promise. 

Porco’s eyes are a hazel bordering on tarnished copper, the same color they’ve always been, through one end of always and out the other.

Blink and she’ll miss it. 

She’s missed before. She won’t miss again. 

“No,” Pieck says finally, “I guess it doesn’t.”

Porco smiles the way he never has and never will for anyone else. And it washes over her: unspoken grief; unspent love; unacceptable loss; the taste of lifetimes of skin, years of blood; the sound of a world on fire. When she saw him. When she didn’t. If there’s a first time for everything, there has to be a last time too, the part where it ends, but how is that possible when they’ve always been—

The next line comes to her, as faint as the first, from the middle of something, from nowhere to now, here: _And I consider eternity another possibility_

Pieck stands on her tiptoes and Porco leans down until their foreheads touch the with same meaning as the way other people might kiss, might look into each other’s eyes like they’re seeing each other for the first time or the last time or both, might finally say “I love you.”

It goes by so fast. It lasts a thousand years. It never happened. It never ended. It did happen, just not there. It ended, just not here. But it’s been them the whole time, every moment.

**Author's Note:**

> If you're not the playlist type, the songs this fic explicitly owes itself to are the following:
> 
> ["Fractions" - Juniper Vale](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDJM-aV-NCw)  
> ["Master of Art" - Laura Stevenson](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X45s0ly9Bcg)  
> ["Slow Grenade" - Ellie Goulding ft. Lauv](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lt7EtplY2Zs) (I especially recommend listening to this on loop for several hours which I may have done and might still be doing)
> 
> Callout post for [Rhetoricfemme](https://archiveofourown.org/users/RhetoricFemme/pseuds/RhetoricFemme), who has borne the brunt of some of the worst things I've ever said or felt about myself in multiple twitter DMs, but somehow has found the kindness and generosity to not only continue to let me call her a friend, but to offer her strength, compassion and grace in a hundred unexpected messages I rarely have the courage to answer. 
> 
> Cheers, RF. This one's for you.
> 
> Thanks for reading. <3
> 
> [@friedcheesemogu](http://www.twitter.com/friedcheesemogu)


End file.
